Abolish Death Penalty India: Rajiv Gandhi assassination convicts Nalini, Murugan launch hunger strike (Tamil Nadu)

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Rajiv Gandhi assassination convicts Nalini, Murugan launch hunger strike (Tamil Nadu)

Feb 11, 2019 21:10 IST

M Manikandan

Hindustan Times, Chennai

Nalini Sriharan and her husband Murugan have been in prison for 28 years and their death sentences were commuted to life in prison.

Five months after the Tamil Nadu cabinet recommended their release from jail, Nalini Sriharan (55) and her husband Murugan (52), two convicts serving life sentences in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, have gone on indefinite hunger strike in Vellore Central prison demanding their early release.

They have also appealed to the Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit to release the other five convicts in the case - Perarivalan, Santhan, Robert Payas, Jayakumar and Ravichandran. According to P Pugazhendhi, Nalini’s lawyer, since the TN Governor Banwarilal Purohit has not responded to the Cabinet’s resolution passed last September recommending the release of seven convicts, the husband and wife duo have started an indefinite hunger strike. “While Nalini started her protest inside the special prison for women in Vellore on Saturday, her husband Murugan launched his hunger strike protest on February 2. Even as the state government has urged the TN Governor for the release of seven convicts, the Governor has not taken any decision. Even though all the seven convicts have spent most of their lives in prison, it is not fathomable why the Governor is delaying the signing of papers enabling their release in spite of the TN cabinet resolution recommending the same,” Pugazhendhi said.

The lawyer said Murugan had been drinking only water since February 2. On February 8 when he met him, Murugan had stopped taking water. The prison staff could not be contacted for comments on Nalini and Murugan’s health but Pugazhendhi said they had requested the duo to end their fast. The Tamil Nadu cabinet had passed a resolution in September last year urging the Governor to release the seven convicts under Article 161 of the Constitution. Nalini also wrote a letter to the Governor on Saturday. “I want to go away from the earth by observing fast from Saturday morning, till I accomplish eternal freedom. Justice was denied to us for the past 28 years. We all are just innocent and circumstances made investigation officers to bring us under this case,” Nalini said in her letter.

Pugazhendhi also said that they would file a petition in the Madras high court seeking a direction to the Governor to take action on the Tamil Nadu Cabinet’s resolution. When Perarivalan approached the Supreme Court last August for release, the Union Government had declined to release the seven accused saying that it would set a wrong example. Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was killed in Sriperumbudur near Chennai, when he was attending an election rally on May 21, 1991 by a suicide bomber named Dhanu of the Sri Lankan rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

A Special Investigation Team (SIT) had taken 23 people into custody for investigation and a trial court had awarded death sentence to all. In 1999, the Supreme Court released 19 accused and convicted three people for a life. But it had upheld the death sentence for Nalini, Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan. In April 2000, the then Tamil Nadu Governor Fathima Beevi commuted Nalini’s death sentence into life imprisonment. Eight years after that, Rajiv Gandhi’s daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra met Nalini in Vellore prison. Priyanka at that time said that she had forgiven Nalini. In 2014, the Supreme Court commuted the death sentence of Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan into life sentence citing the delay in examining their mercy petitions.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/rajiv-gandhi-assassination-convicts-nalini-murugan-launch-hunger-strike/story-oaIxuG7PltdzkZYk3Yn1eJ.html (accessed on 19 February 2019)

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The Death Penalty Scenario in India

India is one of the 193 countries that retains death penalty. There has always been a few imminent judges who have pronounced compelling verdicts upholding the rights of prisoners on death row. There has been increasing debate in various platforms advocating abolition of death penalty or at least to rethink sentencing policies in India. The Indian government has however always been committed to the retention of the death penalty, irrespective of their political ideology. India has voted against a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) draft resolution on the use of death penalty, saying it goes against the statutory law of the country where an execution is carried out in the "rarest of rare" cases. India retains the death penalty as punishment for a number of crimes including murder, kidnapping, terrorism, desertion, inducement to suicide of a minor or a mentally-retarded person and has more recently in 2013 come to include the offence of rape in certain circumstances. Most recently, there is an outrage over child rape and murder.

After observing an unofficial moratorium of 8 years in India, the Indian Government in November 2012 carried out the execution of Ajmal Kasab, convicted in the Mumbai attacks case, without public knowledge. This was followed by the secret execution of Afzal Guru, convicted in the Parliament attack case of 2001, in February 2013, under similar circumstances, without intimating his immediate family or affording a chance of judicial review. In both cases, the executions were carried out under covert operations conducted by the Government immediately upon rejection of their mercy petitions. Before these executions, the last execution to be carried out in India was that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004 who was convicted of rape and murder and which sentence was carried out after he had spent 13 years in solitary confinement. Following this, several mercy petitions of death row convicts have come to be rejected. The fear of execution of such convicts is imminent. Bolstered by the Government's unapologetic conduct and public outcry, especially in recent cases of rape and murder reported in the country, the courts are continuing to hand down death sentences at an alarming rate.

In the recent past, there have been a few empirical studies (mainly four) conducted with prisoners on death row. This has highlighted the situation of prisoners on death row.

(1) Most recently the India Exclusion Report 2017-18 found that fair trial rights and guarantees are reduced to a nullity and seeks to breach the citadel of the collective silence. It further said that Convicts on death row in India belong to groups marginalised along the axes of caste, religion, economic vulnerability and educational deprivation, and their fair trial rights, though a part of the Right to Life guaranteed by the Constitution, are invariably non-existent, a survey of 371 out of the 385 persons living under the death sentence and their families has revealed.

(2) Another study was The Death Penalty Research Project (2015) which was conceived with an aim to document the socio-economic profile of prisoners sentenced to death in India and map their experience within the criminal justice system.

There were two other academic studies that were done conducted by Dr. Reena Mary George –

(3)“Voices of prisoners surviving the death row in India” (2014) done through the University of Vienna under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Christoph Reinprecht (Sociology) and Prof. Dr. Manfred Nowak (Law and Ex-United Nations Rapporteur on Torture). George’s research highlights three salient features, namely: poverty, social exclusion and marginalisation are antecedent to death penalty; death penalty is a constructed account by the state machinery; and prisoners on death row situate dignity higher in the juxtaposition of death and dignity.

(4) Another one “Death Penalty – A Human Rights Perspective” (2009) done through the University of Mumbai under the guidance of Retired Justice Hosbet Suresh. This was a study in Maharashtra with the objectives to firstly study the impact of death penalty on the social, mental, and physical being of the inmate and secondly, to study the perception of opinion leaders on death penalty with reference to human rights. All the above reports are public documents.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, Prison Statistics 2015, there are 101 prisoners sentenced to death. The actual figure of sentences originally awarded is much higher considering the death sentences of 49 convicts came to be commuted to life imprisonment in the said period. As of today, almost in 2019, the figures are unknown through government statistics, however, research centres claim this figure to be around 371 convicts. During the 1980s the Supreme Court sought to restrict the use of the death penalty by characterizing it as a punishment reserved only for the “rarest of the rare” cases. The doctrine has not had the desired effect. According to a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, Rajindar Sachar: “after the rarest of rare doctrine was introduced in 1980, the Supreme Court confirmed death penalty in 40 per cent of cases in the period 1980-90 while it was 37.7 per cent between 1970 and 1980. For the high courts it rose from 59 per cent in 1970-80 to 65 per cent during 1980-90”. Over the past two decades the death penalty has been extended to include more crimes and been handed down with increasing frequency.

Most recently while commuting a sentence in Supreme Court (2018), Justice Joseph did not seek the reconsideration of the Bachan Singh judgment, but only sought to re-examine the purpose and practice of the death penalty, and whether as a punishment, it serves any goal at all. In other words, the death penalty can continue to remain constitutionally valid because of the Bachan Singh judgment, but its application in substantive cases coming before the court must be restricted to only those cases which meet the criteria laid down in that case.

While updating the blog and conducting my own empirical studies, I observed the heinous nature of the crimes that were committed and thought about the families, about their loss, about the victims who for no fault of their own died. If I lost my relative or a dear friend, would I still oppose death penalty and would I still advocate to abolish the death sentence? Having worked in the criminal justice system and also having the seen the other side, where often it is the marginalized, vulnerable and oppressed who are on death row makes me want to advocate for abolition of this punishment. Victims should definitely get justice for their loss, for their pain. No one should escape the rule of law. As long as humanity exists; crime will exist. Should we not re-consider our sentencing policies?

Reena Mary George

Abolish Death Penalty India

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Rajiv Gandhi assassination convicts Nalini, Murugan launch hunger strike (Tamil Nadu)

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